From the author of A Book of One's Own and Stolen Words comes this thoughtful, wide-ranging, at times eccentric survey of the epistolary art. Interwoven with Thomas Mallon's eloquent commentary are Madame de Sévigné's devastatingly sharp reports from the court of Louis XIV, F. Scott Fitzgerald's tormented advice to his young daughter, the besotted midlife billets-doux of a suddenly rejuvenated Woodrow Wilson, the casually brilliant spiritual musings of Flannery O'Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, and the cries from prison of Sacco and Vanzetti.

"Yours Ever is nuanced, informed, full-blooded, a vigorous literary salute.... It is next to impossible to read these pages without mourning the whole apparatus of distance, without experiencing a deep and plangent longing for the airmail envelope, the sweetest shade of blue this side of a Tiffany box. Is it possible to sound crusty or confessional electronically? It is as if text and e-mail messages are of this world, a letter an attempt, however illusory, to transcend it. All of which adds tension and resonance to Mallon's pages, already crackling with hesitations and vulnerabilities, obsessions and aspirations, with reminders of the lost art of literary telepathy, of the aching, attenuated rhythm of a written correspondence."—NYTBR